Censored 2014
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8. For example, “Icelandic People Refuse to Repay Internet Bank’s Multi-Billion Debt,” RT News, March 9, 2010, http://rt.com/news/iceland-icesave-bank-referendum/.
9. For example, “Icelandic Voters Reject Icesave Debt Repayment Plan,” Guardian, April 10, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/10/iceland-icesave-debt-repayment-no-vote.
10. Ben Chu, “‘Total Victory’ for Iceland over UK in Saga of Icesave Depositors,” Independent, January 29, 2013, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/total-victory-for-iceland-over-uk-in-saga-of-icesave-depositors-8470714.html. The EFTA court decision received limited coverage in the New York Times: Andrew Higgins, “Iceland Wins a European Court Victory in a Banking Case,” New York Times, January 29, 2013:B4.
11. The referendum read: “Would you want natural resources which are not in private ownership to be declared the property of the nation in a new Constitution?” Gylfason, “Iceland: Direct Democracy,” and Conrad, “Icelanders Vote.”
12. Conrad, ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. See Gylfason, “Iceland: Direct Democracy,” and Thorvaldur Gylfason, “Putsch: Iceland’s Crowd-Sourced Constitution Killed by Parliament,” Truthout, April 1, 2013, http://truth-out.org/news/item/15462-putsch-icelands-crowd-sourced-constitution-killed-by-parliament.
15. “Constitutional Bill: A proposal for a new constitution for the Republic of Iceland delivered to the Althing by The Constitutional Council on 29 July 2011,” http://stjornarskrarfelagid.is/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Iceland_New_Constitutional_Bill.pdf.
16. The study compared Iceland’s 2012 draft constitution with twenty-four other national constitutions, including Iceland’s current constitution, drafted in 1944, and the US Constitution of 1789. In terms of inclusivity, Iceland’s draft constitution ranked second only to Bolivia’s 2009 constitution. (The US Constitution of 1789 ranked twenty-third, by comparison.) See Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, James Melton, “A Review of Iceland’s Draft Constitution,” Comparative Constitutions Project, October 14, 2012, 3–4, https://webspace.utexas.edu/elkinszs/web/CCP Iceland Report.pdf.
17. Gylfason, “Iceland: Direct Democracy in Action.”
18. Ibid.
19. See Article 66 of the “Constitutional Bill.”
20. “Iceland Vote: Centre-Right Opposition Wins Election,” BBC News, April 28, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22320282.
21. Ibid. See also “Pirate Party Makes History in Iceland Elections,” RT News, April 29, 2013, http://rt.com/news/pirate-party-gains-iceland-587/.
22. Gylfason, “Putsch.”
23. Ibid.
24. Elkins, Ginsburg, and Melton, “Iceland’s Draft Constitution,” 11.
25. See, for example, Sarah Lyall, “Iceland Ousts Government that Steered It Out of Crisis,” New York Times, April 29, 2013:A4; Clemens Bomsdorf, “Iceland Votes for Power Change,” Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2013:A14. A search in the ProQuest Newsstand database, using combinations of the terms “Iceland,” “constitution” and “referendum,” generated no instances of corporate news coverage on the electorates’ overwhelming approval of a new constitution including the commons.
26. Caitlin Dewey, “12 Countries Where the Government Regulates What You Can Name Your Child,” Washington Post, May 3, 2013: “In Iceland, for instance, parents must choose from a list of roughly 1,800 girls’ names and 1,700 boys’ names.”
27. Bleifuss, “Icelandic Lesson.” By contrast, the New York Times notes that “the lessons of Iceland’s turnaround are not readily applicable to Europe’s more complex economies;” see “Iceland’s Mending Economy,” New York Times, July 8, 2012: A6.
28. See Articles 14, 15 and 16, on “Freedom of Opinion and Expression,” “Right to Information” and “Freedom of the Media,” respectively, “Constitutional Bill.”
29. ”Icelandic Modern Media Initiative,” International Modern Media Institute, https://immi.is/index.php/projects/immi.
30. Snowden: “My predisposition is to seek asylum in a country with shared values. The nation that most encompasses this is Iceland. They stood up for people over internet freedom,” quoted in Ewen MacAskill, “Edward Snowden, NSA Files Source: ‘If They Want to Get You, in Time They Will,’” Guardian, June 9, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-why. See also Owen Bowcott, Alexandra Topping, and Ed Pilkington, “Beyond Hong Kong: Edward Snowden’s Best Options for Asylum,” Guardian, June 10, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/10/hong-kong-edward-snowden-asylum.
31. Lowana Veal, “Alternative to Wikileaks Arises in Iceland,” Inter Press Service, September 24, 2012, http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/09/alternative-to-wikileaks-arises-in-iceland/.
32. Associated Whistle-Blowing Press, http://awp.is/.
33. Stuart Bramhall, “Wikileaks Reports FBI Banned from Iceland,” Daily Censored, February 4, 2013, http://www.dailycensored.com/wikileaks-reports-fbi-banned-from-iceland/.
34. “Eight FBI Agents Conduct Interrogation in Iceland in Relation to Ongoing U.S. Investigation of WikiLeaks,” WikiLeaks, February 7, 2013, https://wikileaks.org/Eight-FBI-agents-conduct.html.
35. “Iceland Denies Aid to FBI in WikiLeaks Investigation,” RT, February 2, 2013, http://rt.com/news/iceland-fbi-wikileaks-investigation-292.
36. “Milestone Supreme Court Decision for WikiLeaks Case in Iceland,” WikiLeaks, April 24, 2013, http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_irjulqn.
37. Ibid.
38. Freedom of the Press Foundation, https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/.
39. Mike Sacks, “Free Speech: What if Terry Jones Went to Sweden?,” Christian Science Monitor, October 2, 2010:7; Henry Chu, “Iceland Seeks to Be a Free-Speech Sanctuary,” Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2011: A3.
40. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cun-nison (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967[1925]), 80.
41. Glenn Otis Brown, “Creative Commons Unveils Machine-Readable Copyright Licenses,” Creative Commons, December 16, 2002, http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/entry/3476.
42. Ibid.
43. Jason Hibbets, “Celebrating 10 Years of Creative Commons,” opensource.com, November 29, 2012, http://opensource.com/law/12/11/celebrating-ten-years-creative-commons. See also, Jane Park, “Government and Library Open Data Using Creative Commons Tools,” opensource.com, May 3, 2012, http://opensource.com/government/12/5/government-and-library-open-data-using-creative-commons-tools; Ruth Suehle, “UC Santa Cruz Library Chooses Creative Commons,” opensource.com, February 6, 2012, http://opensource.com/life/12/2/uc-santa-cruz-library-chooses-creative-commons; and Casey Brown, “Creative Commons CEO Reflects on YouTube’s Remixable Library,” opensource.com, July 27, 2012, http://opensource.com/life/12/7/creative-commons-ceo-reflects-youtubes-creative-commons-library.
44. Lawrence Lessig, “Online Artists Share Work—Tyrants Would Prefer They Share a Cell,” Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2013:A17. On the association of CC with Swartz, see for example, Noam Cohen, “A Data Crusader, a Defendant and Now, a Cause,” New York Times, January 14, 2013:Ai.
45. Christine Haughney, “Times Names 2 With Broad Technology Experience to Its Board,” New York Times, June 22, 2012:B2.
46. Timothy Vollmer, “Pallante’s Push for U.S. Copyright Reform,” Creative Commons News, March 20, 2013, http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/37576. See also “Statement of Maria A. Pallante,” Register of Copyrights of the United States Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet, Committee on the Judiciary, United States House of Representatives, i13th Congress, ist Session, March 20, 2013, http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/113th/03202013/Pallante032013.pdf.
47. Vollmer, “Pallante’s Push.”
48. ”The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is the United Nations agency dedicated to the use of intellectual property (patents, copyright, trademarks, designs, etc.) as a means of stimulating innovation and creativity.” See http://www.wipo.int/portal/index.html.en.<
br />
49. Vollmer, “Pallante’s Push.” On TPP, see Censored story #3 and James F. Tracy’s Censored News Cluster on “Plutocracy, Poverty & Prosperity” in this volume.
50. Vollmer, ibid.
51. “Our morality is not solely commercial,” Mauss, The Gift, 63, 66. For a timely assessment of Mauss’s work, see David Graeber, “Give It Away,” Free Words, no date, http://www.freewords.org/graeber.html.
52. Milstein, “Democracy is Direct,” 39: “Democracy’s underlying logic is essentially the unceasing movement of freedom making.”
CHAPTER 2
Déjà Vu
What Happened to Previous Top Censored Stories
Mickey Huff and Nolan Higdon, with research and writing from
Project Censored interns Andrew O’Connor-Watts, Jen Eiden,
Allen Kew, Emmie Ruhland, Aaron Hudson, Rex Yang, Sam Park,
Amitai Cohen, Michael Kolbe, and Matthew Carhart
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
—Aldous Huxley1
Each year, Project Censored reviews stories that were featured in previous years’ Top 25 lists. These reviews focus on the stories’ subsequent corporate coverage and the extent to which they have become part of broader public discourse, or whether they remain “censored” by corporate media and marginal in terms of public exposure and attention.
Too often, we find that Censored stories continue to suffer from neglect by the corporate media. In such cases, but for the original reports by independent journalists, these stories would languish unknown to any segment of the public. For instance, Censored story #1 for 2009, “Over One Million Deaths Caused by US Occupation,” remains unacknowledged by corporate media. Consequently, few Americans understand the extraordinary toll of US military operations in Iraq.2
For Censored stories that the big media outlets do eventually cover, we have noticed a consistent lag of roughly one to two years between the moment when independent journalists cover a particular story and the time when the corporate news “breaks” it. This is the same lag that Project Censored founder, Professor Carl Jensen, noted in analyzing press coverage of the Watergate scandal that led to United States President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Stories about the scandal circulated in the independent press in early 1972, but corporate coverage lagged. Jensen wondered how the outcome of the 1972 election might have differed if Watergate had broken as a prominent news feature much sooner. That was the genesis of Project Censored.
Over thirty-seven years later, the trend of lagging corporate coverage continues. For instance, story #1 from Censored 2012, “More US Soldiers Committed Suicide than Died in Combat” has finally gained momentum in corporate news coverage.3 And, as reported in this chapter, the devastating consequences of US drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia, and especially Pakistan—which featured in independent news coverage at least two years previously—have at last broken through to the attention of corporate media in a meaningful way in 2013. In addition to an update of Censored story #3 from 2012, “Obama Authorizes International Assassination Campaign,” this year Project Censored reviews subsequent coverage of the following stories from Censored 2013: #1, “Signs of an Emerging Police State”; #4, “FBI Agents Responsible for Majority of Terrorist Plots in the United States”; #6, “Small Network of Corporations Run the Global Economy”; #12, “US Joins Forces with al-Qaeda in Syria”; and #16, “Sexual Violence Against Women Soldiers on the Rise and Under Wraps.”4
As we try to learn lessons from our recent history, let us strive for these significant yet underreported stories to get a fair and broad hearing in the present, such that future people’s historians can more accurately and assuredly learn and share their own.
Censored 2013 #1
Signs of an Emerging Police State
SUMMARY: In 2011 and 2012, the United States showed more signs of moving towards a police state. Some examples of such a shift include the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which President Barack Obama signed into law on December 31, 2011. The NDAA’s vague language gave the president the right to use military force to detain American citizens indefinitely without trial. In March 2012, passage of the National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order gave the federal government and military widespread control over the national economy and resources during “national emergencies” as well as “peacetime.” Along with these laws came an increase in surveillance, including the National Security Agency’s construction of a two-billion-dollar electronic intelligence compound in Utah. American citizens continue to have their civil liberties threatened more and more each day.
UPDATE: Until National Security Administration (NSA) whistleblow-er Edward Snowden galvanized the public’s attention on the pervasive nature of domestic surveillance in the US, the continuation of NDAA and NSA policies had been almost completely ignored by the corporate media. The NDAA has received little corporate media coverage since Censored 2013.
In January 2012, journalist Chris Hedges filed a lawsuit to challenge section 1021 (b)(2) of the NDAA, which authorized indefinite detention for anyone who is “a part of or substantially supports al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces.” Federal Judge Katherine B. Forrest issued a permanent injunction on September 11, 2012, blocking the government’s use of NDAA to detain citizens indefinitely. The Obama administration responded with an emergency block and appeal.
As Censored 2014 went to press, no decision had been made on the appeal. Hedges v. Obama received corporate media coverage, mostly in the New York Times. An editorial by the Washington Post offered support for the Obama administration’s appeal, calling Judge Forrest’s ruling an “overreaction.” Originally signed into law with little fanfare on December 31, 2012, when Americans were busy celebrating the New Year’s holiday, the NDAA remains law in 2013 while the appeal is decided. It was signed on for another year by the president in January 2013. Corporate media coverage focused on whether or not President Obama would sign the bill rather than the bill’s specific implications, or Hedges’s lawsuit.
However, also as Censored 2014 went to press, three other major stories about government secrecy and police state power surfaced. One covered the revelations of the Obama justice department spying on Associated Press (AP) and Fox News journalists. A Democracy Now! story with Chris Hedges on May 15, 2013, rightfully called it a terrifying step in the state assault on press freedom, and while the corporate media covered the story and even vilified the Obama administration over it, this faded from memory fairly quickly. After being declared legal by the Obama administration, there was little fanfare as if all this was simply the new normal—eerily, it is.5 The second story, which involved Supreme Court case Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, had arguably even broader civil rights implications than the NDAA or AP scandal and received almost no attention in the media. In this case, justices ruled that speech (and other forms of nonviolent advocacy) could be construed as material support for terrorist organizations.6
The last of these stories, however, did break, blowing up in the media even more than both of the preceding stories—in fact, overshadowing them. This involved Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who leaked information regarding an NSA program, PRISM, that collects data on all Americans, creating a massive spy database. Journalist Glenn Greenwald broke the story in the Guardian (out of London, so not a US media outlet).7 The story was quickly pounced upon by the US press, but mostly to deny or downplay the claims of America’s latest whistleblower. Many prominent liberals like Jeffrey Toobin attacked Snowden as a narcissist who should be in prison, a sentiment echoed by most Washington establishment politicians and the press.8 For most in the corporate media, there was little interest in the specifics of what Snowden was revealing via Greenwald, and, rather, a great focus on spinning the information and how these programs are part of the war on terror, while framing Snowden as a traitor, not a hero exposing controversial and dub
ious government spy programs. This is a common theme, as we will see.
In what should be the high-profile legal case of the year, most US major media are absent from or locked out of the WikiLeaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning trial that began in early June (see story #1 in chapter 1 of this volume). According to Rainey Reitman of Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Military District of Washington Media Desk, which issues press passes, only granted 70 out of 350 requests for media access. Reader Supported News filed a motion to intervene and secure media access, or at least a video feed of the proceedings, and the judge ruled against the motion even though many of the seventy people granted access were apparently not even showing up to the media operations room.9
Further, what corporate media coverage there was regarding the Manning trial seemed to miss the point, as was shown by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone. Taibbi wrote that “the government couldn’t have scripted the headlines any better.”10 The government court marshal and compliant corporate media have tried to make the case about Pfc. Manning, a troubled young man with gender identity issues, and frame the case by posing the question of “Is he a hero or traitor?” Taibbi rightfully called out this distraction, saying, “In reality, this case does not have anything to do with who Bradley Manning is, or even, really, what his motives were. This case is entirely about the ‘classified’ materials Manning had access to, and whether or not they contained widespread evidence of war crimes.”11 Most in the corporate media have missed this point,12 and it’s likely that Pentagon public relations people couldn’t be happier with the coverage (and they didn’t have to dip into their five billion dollar budget specifically for Pentagon PR). Further proving Taibbi’s point, Time magazine’s cover story during the second week of June equated whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden with spies. Again, a government PR team couldn’t do a better job disseminating such propaganda.13